Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Ryzen countdown: list of new CPUs, specs, price and release date

The wait for AMD’s long waited Ryzen
microprocessors is almost over. According to many sources worldwide, at least
some of these next-gen high-end chips are going to be released within February
28th – March 2nd timeframe. With the NDA being lifted at
the end of the current month, we can expect to see the reviews and benchmarks
on the launch date too. The reports suggest that it’ll be the flagship
8-core/16-thread models coming out first, followed closely by the others
members of what is supposed to be a family of no less than 17 brand new CPUs.
Various tech publications seem to have already gotten their hands on review
samples; which means Ryzen is being put through its paces as I write this!

It’s about time, you may say. The last few months have
been quite the trial for every personal-computer enthusiasts out there! With
every bit of anticipation geared toward AMD’s latest desktop processor, all the
traffics of tech world’s fast lanes seemed to be moving into one direction only
– Ryzen. Not often a piece of hardware gets this much attention from media and
fans, but then Ryzen at this moment is not just a piece of silicon – it has
become the symbol of long lost competition in high-end processor space. And it’s
the exact segment where AMD is going to draw the battle lines. We already have
a list of Ryzen processors in our disposal; have at it if you like.

Leaked list of Ryzen processors, click to enlarge

This list is not official and by no means complete, we’ll
update it accordingly when AMD officially publishes one. Just as we reported
before, AMD is going with a new naming scheme where the ‘R’ prefix obviously
stands for Ryzen. But that’s not all; AMD is also dividing the new chips into
three distinct families – R7, R5 and R3. Now, you can see what message AMD is
trying to convey here by borrowing a page from it’s arch-rival’s book – it
believes Ryzen has what it takes to go toe-to-toe with Intel’s incumbent i7/i5/i3
families. Spearheaded by the mighty 1800X, the R7 chips are all full-fledged
octal-core parts aided with SMT (Simultaneous multithreading) and a massive 16
megabytes of last level cache. With its high core count and clock-speed, the R7s
are poised to take on Intel’s HEDT processors like i7-6800K/i7-6900K in highly
threaded workstation environments. The 6C/12T R5s too have the same 16MB L3
cache while the 4C/8T parts get 8MB. Look out for the likes of R7 1700 and R5
1500 both of which could become darlings of power users if things go as
projected by AMD. Finally there is the R3 with “only” four physical cores and 8
MB L3 – you can guess why Intel is shipping Pentiums with HT enabled!

Aside of delivering a huge increment in IPC (Instruction per
Clock-cycle), one of the design goals of Zen micro-architecture was to increase
energy efficiency - an area where AMD’s last generation FX processors failed
miserably. To that end AMD’s engineers seem to have kept their promise – or at
least that’s what the power numbers suggest. Flagship Ryzen CPUs sport a TDP of
only 95W which is excellent if you consider the number of cores on offer. Some
models like the R7-1700 come with an even lower 65W footprint which suggests a
certain amount of scalability within the architecture. And this is where XFR is
going play a big role. XFR or Extended
Frequency Range
is Ryzen’s secret sauce – it’s an algorithm that propels the core-frequency
beyond the range of conventional Turbo-boost, given there is temperature
headroom. The ‘X’ suffix denotes the availability of XFR and may represent
better binning. AMD claimed back in its New Horizon event that XFR would reward
enthusiasts with better cooling but didn’t clarify on what their perception of
better cooling is. Regardless, every Ryzen CPU is unlocked and very much
overclockable and you don’t have to pay extra for that!

Needless to say, the best thing about Ryzen is its price - provided
the suggestive prices hold-up. Can you imagine how a processor like R5 1400X –
a legitimate quad-core chip with SMT enabled, is going to impact the budget
conscious mainstream market when sold for ~$199/INR.14,000? I can and I can’t
wait for that!